Ok, whaddawe got goin’ on here, some macro I have to cover?

Choices, choices. Tempting as it is to just eat the business end of that M&P Bodyguard 2.0 I mentioned in “Resignation” rather than wade through an ISM report, I’ll stay with you. For now. (As a quick aside for the firearm enthusiasts among you, that’s a great little handgun if you can get over the silly “Men don’t carry 380s” machismo.)

The marquee gauge of US factory activity printed 55.5 for October, a solid start to a week that’s chock-full of top-tier releases. The ISM manufacturing headline now sits at a three-month high. Consensus expected an unchanged 54.5 from the readout.

As the figure above reminds you, we’re witnessing a veritable renaissance for American manufacturing. Or at least for the most-trusted factory-sector survey.

After a years-long “recession,” the ISM headline’s spent every month of 2026 in expansion territory. The boilerplate narrative says that’s in no small part a function of the AI buildout.

Rather than subject that narrative to the sort of scrutiny it probably deserves, I’ll just note that the SOX and the ISM headline map pretty well onto one another if you can suffer a multi-faceted chart crime.

There are any number of issues with that visual. For one thing, it’s not obvious that the change in the ISM headline should be measured in percentage terms, and in addition to being a double y-axis chart, one of the axes is staggered to make the fit “work.” Take that for whatever it’s worth. Or isn’t worth.

A quick run through the ISM internals shows the main demand gauge at 55.5 — i.e., New Orders was the same as the headline for October — and the Production index hit 59, the highest since 2021. You probably want to re-read that latter bit. That’s a scorcher for the main activity metric.

On the jobs-prices juxtaposition, there was good news. Prices Paid retreated more than expected to a (still very high) 75.2, while the employment index slipped less than feared to 52.4, still indicative of net hiring.

The MoM decline on the Price index is welcome news: Recall that the increase in September was the largest since the onset of the war.

All in all, I’d describe this as a good report. There’s just one problem: ISM wouldn’t and didn’t.

“In October, general sentiment got worse for a third month in a row, with 34% of the comments positive and 66% negative,” the color accompanying the release said.

Among Debbie Downers, the most frequent complaints related to prices, supply chains, tariffs and the Iran war.

Now if only it were possible to discern whose fault all of that is, we could vote the miserable son of a bitch out of office.